Research News September 2016

Reading philosophy staff have had a busy Summer and start to the new academic year! Here is a snapshot of their activities.

James Andow presented his research at the European Society for Aesthetics conference in Barcelona, the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics conference in Vienna, as well as the International Congress of Psychology in Yokohama. Two of James’s articles were published this summer in Philosophical Psychology — ‘Qualitative tools and experimental philosophy’ and ‘Reliable but not home free? What framing effects mean for moral intuitions’ — and his article ‘Abduction by Philosophers: Reorienting Philosophical Methodology’ came out in Metaphilosophy in July.

Luke Elson presented papers at the International Society for Utilitarian Studies in Lille (‘how implausible is satisficing consequentialism?’) and at the Southern Normativity Group annual meeting in Sussex (‘the size of the universe and nihilism’).

Nat Hansen is an external faculty fellow at Stanford University’s Humanities Center during the academic year 2016-2017. In July, Nat and Phil Beaman (Reading, Psychology) were awarded a Leverhulme Research Project Grant on the topic of “The Psychology of Philosophical Thought Experiments”, which will run from 2017-2019. Over the summer, Nat presented his current research on colour terms to the University of Zürich’s colloquium on “Concepts, Ideals and Universals”, and to the Semantics, Pragmatics and Philosophy of Language workshop at the University of Cambridge. In September, Nat was in New York City, giving talks at the New York Philosophy of Language Workshop at NYU, and at the seminar on Stanley Cavell at the New School for Social Research. Later in the autumn term, Nat will give a talk at the University of Chicago and attend the Arizona State experimental philosophy conference in Sedona, Arizona.

In June, Professor David Oderberg gave a paper on philosophy of biology at a conference at Senate House, London, viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zITXtvstHBk. He has just been commissioned by a London think tank to write a short policy monograph on conscientious objection in health care and related issues, and will be giving talk on matters related to this at the University of Buckingham in October. In August he was named by http://www.thebestschools.org as one of the fifty most influential living philosophers.

Professor John Preston presented his paper ‘Ernst Mach and the Remarks on Science in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus’ to the Centenary Conference on Ernst Mach at the University of Vienna (in June).

Assoc. Professor Severin Schroeder spoke at a conference on Action & Intentionality at the University of Toledo in September, and afterwards gave a series of research seminars at the University of Grenoble.

James Stazicker was in St Andrew’s in August, at a European Society for Philosophy and Psychology symposium about consciousness and higher cognition. In June, James gave a talk with Miguel Ángel Sebastián at the Centre for Cognition Research, as part of their Newton Mobility Grant project about perceptual discrimination, and he also contributed to a ReThinking the Senses workshop about attention in London.